By now, we’ve all heard the news that AOL has bought the Huffington Post for $315 million. It’s AOL CEO Tim Armstrong’s largest acquisition to date and the deal brings Arianna Huffington over to the company as Editor In Chief in charge of all AOL properties, including Engadget, TechCrunch and others (read AOL’s internal memo about the deal here).

Arianna and Tim held a call for analysts and media yesterday but today at Federated Media’s Signal: LA event, the duo is taking the stage with John Battelle to discuss the newly formed partnership. We’ve embedded the livestream of their conversation here.

OpenX, provider of digital advertising technology for Web publishers around the world, has updated the ad technology platform currently in use by online juggernauts like Groupon, Orange-France Telecom and Excite Japan. The true strength of the platform is that it combines both powerful ad serving capabilities and real-time bidding on ad inventory within a single product (OpenX Enterprise, to be more precise).

The platform, which becomes available to all publishers today, is designed to help publishers efficiently manage a variety of digital revenue streams and optimize non-guaranteed and real-time bidded advertising demand. All in a single interface.

Another noteworthy component of the OpenX Enterprise platform is an integrated data collection and targeting system that allows publishers to use both proprietary and third-party data to enable audience-based media buying across their entire inventory.

The platform comes with a complete API framework and object-based design, making it relatively easy to integrate with other components of the publisher's enterprise software stack.

Today, OpenX’ ad-serving products are used by more than 200,000 websites in more than 100 countries, and serve more than 350 billion ads monthly. Its other product, OpenX Market, is said to reach more than 400 million monthly unique users all over the globe.

Groupon has been using OpenX Enterprise for quite some time now to power ads on its website and email blasts in the US, but for French telecom giant Orange the adoption of the platform means a move away from Google’s DoubleClick. If anything, this shows OpenX can effectively compete with giants like Google, but also Yahoo and our parent company AOL.

The move is, however, not that surprising, considering both companies already had a partnership in place for the joint operation of a European advertising marketplace.

Los Angeles-based OpenX is backed by investors like Accel Partners, First Round Capital and Index Ventures, and is headed by CEO Tim Cadogan, a former senior Yahoo exec.

So I think TechCrunch might have acquired the Huffington Post for $315 million or something. I’m not too sure, I try to stay out of this news stuff. Thankfully there’s this helpful and poetic Next Media Animation that tries to explain things; From Tim Armstrong (tarmstrong@aol.com) bidding on HuffPo on eBay to Arianna Huffington pulling a Wizard of Oz on rivals Hot Air, Gawker and Drudge Report, to the portral of Bebo as a literal monkey on Aol’s back, I think it pretty much sums it up.

My favorite part, Aol’s goals for 2011: “Make it 1997 again through science or magic.”

Students at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands have created a “Reality Touch Screen,” a 10 meter long touchscreen that accepts up to 100 multitouch inputs at a time. As we see from this short video, the effects they’ve been able to create are wild and the sensitivity looks great.

Behind the long screen are six cameras and 16 infrared lights. When you touch the screen, a small amount of infrared light is reflected back and the cameras sense the position and then translate that into coordinates on the surface. It is curved over 135 degrees, thereby creating an immersive environment.

Read more…

According to WSJ report, HTC has purchased at $40 million stake in streaming game company OnLive, a move that points to HTC’s impetus towards content distribution alongside their standard handset manufacturing business. OnLive works by placing games “in the cloud” and running them on dedicated consoles on a network instead of on hardware in the home, or, in this case, on a phone.

HTC also bough Saffron Digital, a streaming video business that specializes in sending DRM-protected video streams. The idea, then, is for HTC’s Sense UI to move from the handset to the television, an optimistic move that could place HTC branding on more than just phones.

Read more…

On the look out for some easy karma? Head over to Kickstarter and help make four woman’s bamboo iPad case a reality. The group is looking for $10,000 to bring their actually clever case to the market.

The Wüdskins case use bamboo and aluminum to encase a first-gen iPad in a solid and functional case. Sure, it’s a bit bulky and probably somewhat heavy, but you can’t argue against the protection it provides because bamboo is, you know, the Iron Man of wood.

Read More

Good news for European startups who like investors who shoot from the hip, tell it like it is and throw in a few good Pirate phrases for good measure. Dave McClure, venture capitalist and founding general partner at 500 Startups, an internet seed fund and startup accelerator program in Mountain View, CA, is to speak at GeeknRolla, the European startup conference in London on March 30.

Dave has been working in Silicon Valley for over twenty years, and in his time has worked with PayPal, Mint, Founders Fund, Facebook, LinkedIn, SlideShare, Twilio, Simply Hired, O'Reilly Media, Intel, and Microsoft, to name just a few. In addition to this he has has been an investor in over 100 startup companies including: Mint, SlideShare, SendGrid, Credit Karma, Wildfire Interactive, Bit.ly, CrowdFlower, KissMetrics, TeachStreet, MyGengo, Mashery, and… well the list goes on.

Online dating site Zoosk is announcing some impressive revenue numbers this morning, reporting that the startup has grown its annual sales run rate approximately 250% in 2010 to more than $90 million. That’s up from $20 million in revenue in 2009.

Zoosk says that sales growth was driven primarily by sales of its premium subscriptions, which are offered in 60 different countries around the world. International expansion is a big area of growth for the dating site, which has support for 25 different languages and has started a global advertising campaign. And the company added iPhone and Android apps as well as a desktop app (which received 4 million downloads) in 2010.

Launched in late 2007, Zoosk has raised $40.5 million in new funding, and rolled out a proprietary matching technology, which has suggested more than 700 million matches since it was first launched in September 2010.

All signs point to Zoosk being a leader in the online dating space. It should be interesting to see how Zoosk continues to compete with online dating giant Match.com, eHarmony and others. IAC’s Match.com has steadily been acquiring online dating sites, recently buying OKCupid for for $50 million.

Freespee, which provides call tracking and pay-per-call solutions for the "lead generation industry", has closed a second round of funding of 1.1 million euros. The new investment comes from Finland's Inventure and will be used to fuel growth across Europe. It follows previous funding in October 2009 to the tune of €800k also from the Finnish VC fund whose other investments include Whitevector, Conmio, Rightware and Thinglink.

Stardoll, the online fashion game aimed at teen and "tween" girls, is to enter a multi-year licensing agreement with toy giant Mattel to create toys based on the characters in the game. The first products will ship this autumn according to Mattias Miksche CEO of Stardoll, at the International Toy Fair. Mattel already knows Stardoll well from having advertised its own brands on the site, like Barbie, Fashionistas and Monster High. It's also sponsored fan clubs, created exclusive dolls and a virtual store. Miksche says Stardoll is now "very focused on entering the licensing space."

Meebo, the online IM service that has increasingly become known for its social toolbar that adorns thousands of websites, has acquired Mindset Media. Mindset Media targets ads based on psychographics — it uses criteria commonly seen in ad targeting systems, like gender and age, in addition to other variables that it says establish user preferences and personality, which can in turn be used by advertisers. Terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed, though Meebo does say it will be incorporating the twelve members of Mindset’s team into its own workforce.

The acquisition sets the stage for Meebo to move into the direct response ad market. Meebo says that it’s now on over 8,000 sites, reaching some 76.6 million people in the United States (of course, these users are visiting sites with the Meebo Bar installed, but aren’t necessarily using it). With this growing distribution Meebo believes it has an opportunity to help advertisers directly reach customers.

Back in November last year the UK’s Prime Minister said he was announcing a number of initiatives aimed at technology companies. Since then there have been a few periphery announcements from the various large tech companies (Google, Facebook et al) about what they would do to help. But one thing that was on the agenda was a review of the Intellectual Property rules. PM David Cameron confirmed a six month review into IP law that he hopes will help attract technology companies to the UK.

And incredibly the government is putting its money where its mouth is. It’s appointed a panel of IP experts, chaired by Professor Ian Hargreaves, to review the IP system. They're in the process of meeting with a wide range of people and on Tuesday, 15 February, they're organising a meeting in London.

Meraki, the cloud-based wireless networking company has raised $15 million in Series C funding led by Sequoia Capital. This brings Meraki’s total funding to $40 million. Previous investors include Google, DAG Ventures and Northgate Capital.

Meraki provides hardware and software for building large scale wireless networks that are used by businesses, schools, and other organizations. Meraki has provided free WiFi that covers about 4 square miles in San Francisco. And Meraki also powers WiFi for businesses and organizations, including Burger King, Albany State University, Stanford, Telmex, Epic Management and THQ.

The company, which grew out of a research project at MIT in 2006, says that it ended 2010 with over 17,000 networks deployed worldwide and over 35 million client devices connected. The new funding will be used towards R&D in Meraki's cloud networking technologies and to scale sales and marketing activities.

TechCrunch Editor Sarah Lacy’s new book Brilliant Crazy, Cocky: How The Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit From Global Chaos has been out for a couple of weeks now. I had an early copy and read it, but held off on a review until a independent ones came in.

In the meantime, I read it again. Because I realized that Sarah kind of has it all wrong. Or at least didn’t draw the final conclusion that I did based on all her work.

Not to knock the book. It’s an excellent piece of journalism, taken from nearly a year of traveling around the world to meet with entrepreneurs in Asia, Africa, Israel and South America. To try to understand how entrepreneurs are reshaping their worlds in those places, and how America is sometimes being left behind.

There are some truly amazing stories. A Brazilian named Marco Gomes who grew up in the slums of Rio before eventually starting his own company, getting featured on TechCrunch, raising venture capital and running forward from there. A slew of fearless Chinese entrepreneurs who are creating some of the most trafficked websites on the Internet. And, even, an entrepreneur in Rwanda who made his first entrepreneurial strides by producing…toilet paper.

Lacy is right that entrepreneurship is spreading around the world in ways that it never did before. And she’s right that Americans need to, and in many cases are, taking note and making investments in these non-U.S. entrepreneurs.

And she’s right that we are not holding on to enough immigrants, which are a crucial part of many of Silicon Valley’s most successful startups. “One quarter of successful Silicon Valley companies were started by immigrants,” Lacy says, mentioning Intel, PayPal, Google and Yahoo.

But Sarah seems to be arguing that there’s something to fear in the spread of entrepreneurism, that the more of it that happens outside of Silicon Valley, the more we should be worried.

I don’t think that’s the case. I agree, strongly, that we should do more to spur entrepreneurism here. Mostly by leaving Silicon Valley alone.

But here’s what I think people, particularly governments, should really be taking from the book: Shame on you. Shame on you that in Rwanda Jean de Dieu Kagabo chose to make toilet paper instead of starting the next multi-billion dollar tech company. Or that a brilliant kid in Brazil needs to worry about getting shot by drug dealers. Or that Indian entrepreneurs need to worry about electricity and water. Or that Chinese entrepreneurs live in nearly perfect economic freedom but ignore the elephant in the room – an oppressive government that occasionally shuts down businesses on a political whim.

Yes, people like Jean de Dieu Kagabo and Marco Gomes and all the rest will always find a way to make their lives better through entrepreneurship. War, poverty, hunger and oppression won’t keep them down.

But it sure does stifle them. Far better for the world to make life more bearable for people, and see where entrepreneurs lead them. Then, maybe, Silicon Valley can start to get its butt kicked. Which maybe will get our politicians to ease up on milking that cow. Which will spur more international competition. And human progress will move forward at an accelerated pace.

Sarah’s book opened my eyes. But not to the risk that Silicon Valley can be toppled. Rather, she opened my eyes to the untenable constraints that people around the world have to work with. And damnit, that needs to change.

Silicon Valley isn’t a place. It’s an idea. And whether you’re making toilet paper in Rwanda or building gaming companies in Asia, you’re part of it.

So buy this book. And read it. You may not agree with me, but you’ll better understand the world, and our community. And maybe help future entrepreneurs channel their energy into even more amazing things.

Last week, we covered the launch of the Collaborative Fund, angel investor Craig Shapiro's new seed fund aimed at supporting for-profit startups with a social mission. Specifically, Collaborative Fund is investing in companies that apply emerging technologies to peer-to-peer collaboration—like sharing, bartering, trading, and organizing—in order to benefit the greater good. Joining Shapiro in his quest is a formidable group of talent, including YouTube founder Chad Hurley, Kiva co-founder Jessica Jackley, and founder and chairman of Media Labs Nicholas Negroponte.

One of the Collaborative Fund's recent investments is Groundcrew, a company that utilizes geo-location and messaging to help average Joes and businesses coordinate mobile teams. Unlike the hyper-focus of an app like Wheretheladies.at, Groundcrew has broader, more community-conscious goals in mind than helping a dude get laid. Reflecting Collaborative Fund's effort to promote social enterprises responding to broken or outdated models, Groundcrew CEO Joe Edelman told me that the inspiration for the platform grew out of his experience as a relief worker in post-Katrina New Orleans. The appallingly slow coordination and mobilization of relief in the wake of Katrina was a well-documented nightmare and made the public's (and government's) need for a better model for geo-coordination frighteningly clear.

Groundcrew aims to capitalize on the beginnings of a geo-coordination revolution by offering web and mobile software that allows individuals, businesses, and teams to rally community members around a particular issue, gather them in real life, mobilize those teams in real-time, and reuse, manage, and share resources during and after those events.

The uses of this service are potentially endless; think of it as a way to organize and coordinate everything from house parties and oil rig evacuations to medical care and traffic flow. Traditionally, only large organizations with multi-million dollar budgets have had access to realtime planning and mobilization software, but today we’re seeing a host of small companies entering the market with the goal of coordinating real-world activity from car-sharing and dating to carpools—like Uber, Getaround, TaskRabbit, and NeighborGoods to name a few.

These companies have begun to disrupt the traditional model, offering location information, mobile messaging, opportunity detection, and integration with social media — all great features. However, on the back-end, for developers looking to create apps or scale their clients’ services using these features, they’re often forced to create a mobile client for each mobile platform, bridges to social media APIs, an SMS infrastructure, in order to achieve these goals. This can be time-consuming and impractical.

Groundcrew offers these functions, along with the ability to see which of your team members are available and contact them via SMS, IM, Twitter, or email, but it hopes to set itself apart by seeing the broad picture and doing the hard work for both businesses and developers. To make their jobs easier, for example, Groundcrew provides access to its mobile clients' open-source libraries as well as its own web-based interface, scripting language, and API, allowing developers to create branded apps without the fuss and the muss.

Edelman says that the current mindset of the geo-coordination space is to "treat coordination as a kind of special sauce. This is comparable to the state of websites before the rise of WordPress, Drupal, wikis, and Google Sites. What we're going to do to this market is make it easy for even complete amateurs…"

In order to make it a one-stop shop platform for all your coordination needs, the Groundcrew team, which includes co-founder and former Interaction Designer at Google Chad Thornton and Developer Jordan Stout, wrote its own scripting language, called CEML (Coordinated Event Markup Language). The team claims that CEML is the "first system for scripting group dynamics and civil logistics," which allows developers to write actions that could, "say, rapidly divide a stadium worth of people into six-person teams with different roles and assignments." You can check it out on their API page here.

While similar enterprises like Uber may have more visibility and user adoption, Groundcrew has already raised $700,000 of funding from Collaborative Fund and investors like Dave McClure and Jason Calcanis, and a few Bay Area organizations have begun testing Groundcrew pilots, including the Red Cross, San Francisco-based game developer, Situate, and eldercare group called Avenidas.

So, are you looking to organize and coordinate a crowd of groupies for your Hall & Oates coverband's big show, or plan a surprise birthday party for your cat? Groundcrew thinks that making their software available to ordinary people and communities like yours has big potential.

NoSQL companies unite! Membase (formerly NorthScale) and CouchOne have decided to merge to form Couchbase, which will provide a comprehensive family of NoSQL (which focuses on adding horizontal scalability to databases) database products for enterprise companies. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

CouchOne, which has raised $2 million in venture funding, provides database products powered by CouchDB, a free open source indexable document database server which uses Javascript as a query language. CouchDB is designed for the reporting and storage of large amounts of semi-structured, document oriented data.

Membase's data management technology, which was launched in 2009, is designed for web-based companies, particularly startups that deal with large amounts of transactional data. For example, social gaming giant Zynga and AOL use Membase’s database technology. Membase’s elastic data infrastructure software promises to cache frequently used data while also offering performance and scalability. In fact, Membase, which has raised $15 million in funding, says that its core technology powers 18 of the top 20 largest websites.

As part of the deal, Membase’s CEO, Bob Wiederhold, will become CEO of the combined company, with CouchOne CEO Damien Katz serving as Couchbase CTO. However, the merger not only results in the joining of two companies, but also combines CouchDB, memcached and Membase technologies. Together, the new company, Couchbase, will offer an end-to-end database solution that can be stored on a single server or spread across hundreds of servers.

Both Membase and CouchOne’s founders say the merger makes the end product a more comprehensive offering. For example, now Couchbase’s offerings are optimized for the data center, desktop and mobile devices. Products will include Elastic Couchbase (formerly Membase Server, Couchbase (for smaller Couchbase production deployments), mobile Couchbase (for iOS apps), and Hosted Couchbase.

Over the years we’ve seen Drobo expand its portfolio of devices from a strictly consumer-oriented lineup to a broader and more business-friendly one. October’s DroboPro FS made a beeline for small businesses by mashing up its networking-centric FS series with the 8-drive Pro series. And now they’re taking that a step further with the 12-bay version of the same.

There’s a naming convention change, too, with numbers and everything, something I never thought I’d see Drobo do. The new B1200i denotes the 12 bays it has and the iSCSI interface. What was wrong with “DroboDozen”?

Continue reading…

Looks like the Malcolm Gladwell backlash has reached its tipping point. (YOU SEE WHAT I DID THERE?). Inspired by such weighty titles as The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers, Cory Bortnicker and Brett Molé have built a “generator” of 25 Gladwellian book covers like the above Blank, Yoga: How Hot Trends Make People Buy Books, Vague: The Power of Generalizations To Impress The Bored and (my personal favorite) Monster Cocks: The Last Book You’d Think I’d Write.

What did Gladwell do to warrant such opprobrium? He questioned the power of the Internet.

“But surely the least interesting fact about them is that some of the protesters may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the tools of the new media to communicate with one another.”

Gasp! Gladwell is, get this, not interested in the tools of new media, let’s make fun of him. Malcolm Gladwell, you’re old/not tech savvy!

Okay okay, so maybe I live for the day where I get paid to write shallow Gladwell-esque non-fiction about whatever pseudo-intellectual lark strikes my fancy (not). I really want to add a smiley at the end of that sentence.

In any case, Gladwell might actually be writing My Retirement: What Super-Trendy Book Buyers Like Yourself Are Paying For. I think it could really take off.

http://malcolmgladwellbookgenerator.com/ /via Paul Carr

Last year, after two full days of hacking, only one web browser emerged from Pwn2Own unscathed: Google Chrome. IE8, Safari 4, Firefox 3, and even Safari on iOS actually all fell after just one day, but no one could seem to penetrate Chrome. In fact, despite a $10,000 bounty to crack their “sandbox”, no one even tried, likely figuring it was futile. And so this year, Pwn2Own wasn’t even going to invite Chrome back. Then Google stepped in with wads of cash.

While the lineup for Pwn2Own 2011 was announced a few days ago, Google took the time today to give a bit more details about their role in the event. Of note, they write: “Chrome wasn't originally going to be included as a target browser in the competition, but Google volunteered to sponsor Chrome's participation by contributing monetary rewards for Chrome exploits.”

In other words: bring it, hackers.

Specifically, Google worked with the conference to come up with rules for hacking the code found in Chromium (the open source browser on which Chrome is based). On day one, if anyone is able get nail a working exploit of Chrome (again, cracking the sandbox), Google will pay them $20,000. On day two and three, the same $20,000 will be paid out for “bugs in the kernel, device drivers, system libraries, etc,” but Google and the conference will split the cost of that reward (since Google says it cares more about the first variety).

It says a lot that Chrome was the one browser not hacked last year. It says even more than this year they’re sponsoring their own participation and doubling the reward. But it’s standard business now for Google to dish out cash rewards for people who find issues with their browser. And it’s a really smart idea.

One thing Google does note is that Chrome OS, which is built with Chrome, is not a part of this competition. Because it’s still “beta” software, Google apparently doesn’t feel confident enough in it yet for it to stand up to the hackers.

Paul Carr, our on again, off again, sometimes full time employee, often irregular contributor, reminds me of a certain ex girlfriend. It’s a dramatic relationship, always interesting, but you just know it’s going to end up a mess. Still, I love his writing.

And don’t get me wrong, We encourage our writers and editors to build their personal brand. Erick Schonfeld’s been on Charlie Rose, which pleased his mother to no end. Most of our writers are occasionally talking heads on various cable news shows. Sarah Lacy has published two books on entrepreneurship (her new one is here). CrunchGear Editor John Biggs has been threatening to publish a book about Marie Antoinette's watch, the "iPhone of its day," for as long as I’ve known him.

Paul Carr, though.

He’s got a book (and it’s good). And the next one, about his life living in hotels (he only lives in hotels, all the time), is on pre-order.

So the logical next step in building his personal brand? A multi-page feature article in the UK’s Loaded magazine. Talking about how hard he parties in hotels. And featuring pictures of barely dressed women in said hotels.

You can read it here. Images from the print version on Paul’s blog are here.

Here’s what we learn about Paul.

Three years, close to 300 hotels and about a million anecdotes later, Paul symbolises a freedom man would sell his own sister to achieve – living like James Bond in a different hotel each night for next to nothing, whether it's a penthouse in Vegas, studio in the Spanish mountains or his most regular haunt: a three-room suite in San Francisco, successfully wangled for a mere $40 a night.

and

"I woke up drunk, stark fucking naked in a hotel corridor, no idea how I got there. I was sitting outside my room, I didn't have any clothes so obviously I didn't have my key. "This hotel was a boutique with few windows, so I couldn't tell if it was noon or 3am. Having to go down to the hotel lobby, awkwardly covering myself up and begging this massive Russian night porter to let me back into my room while he stood as far away from me as he possibly could in the lift… it was one of those moments where I thought: 'This is not a way for a grown man to live.'"

Thanks Paul. We couldn’t be prouder.

If you blinked you might have missed last Friday’s news that Chinese Web giant Tencent is buying LA-based Riot Games. And that’s just fine by Tencent.

Tencent and its founder Pony Ma (seen in a sea of winking penguins to your left) are incredibly press-shy, as everything about the way the deal “leaked” demonstrates. It came late on a Friday before the Superbowl, it was positioned as Tencent buying an undisclosed “majority share” and not an acquisition – even the subsequent analysis was that it was just more proof of how hot the US gaming market is. Even Chinese companies were buying into it!

In fact, this deal represents way more than that – and anyone in the game industry should be paying attention. Not only is this one of the biggest gaming acquisitions of late and one of the biggest purchases of an American company by a Chinese company, but it shows who really understands where gaming is going at a big company level. This isn’t about China suddenly wanting a piece of the hot US gaming market– China and Korea are light years ahead of many gaming startups when it comes to in-browser games and virtual goods. According to Mitch Lasky, a Benchmark partner and investor in Riot, the deal was hotly contested and almost every suitor was from China or Korea. American gaming companies who get on conference calls to talk about how badly they want to expand in this market were nowhere to be found. “American companies don’t get the future they are facing,” Lasky says. “It’s remarkable how short-sighted they are being.” Put a more macro way: This new generation of in-browser gaming and virtual goods could well be the first Internet category where America simply doesn’t dominate.

And Tencent is the most formidable of the next generation gaming titans. The company has been methodically building relationships in the Valley for years, very quietly acquiring stakes in dozens of companies and some small companies outright. As a refresher, the company is not merely the largest Web company in China, it’s the third largest publicly traded Internet company on earth. Like most Chinese companies, it’s been loathe to make acquisitions in China– in part because of it doesn’t want to dilute its culture– and in the US– in part because it doesn’t want the potential American backlash. The fact that this deal was slipped so under the radar, with no outcry no doubt will embolden Tencent and others to make more US purchases.

And, for the entrepreneurs involved, that’s a good thing. There are certain strengths that Chinese Internet companies have that American Internet companies don’t, mostly around monetization execution and micro-payments. Just as a wave of Chinese entrepreneurs learned from working at Valley-based multinationals, so too do gaming entrepreneurs have a lot to learn from Chinese and Korean gaming companies. That’s the big leagues when it comes to high-volume computer-based gaming, not anything happening over here. What Tencent could teach an entrepreneur about scaling and thwarting thousands of hacks per second could rival the most seasoned Valley geek.

Like most things Tencent does, the deal was methodical and a long time coming. The company was an investor in Riot, and has positioned this as a buyout of other shareholders, rather than a straight acquisition. That’s technically true, but it’s not just a DST-like secondary deal. All of the other investors and shareholders– save a group of management Tencent wanted to still have skin in the game– got cashed out. And my understanding from people close to the deal was it was cash, with very little earn-out on the back end.

It’s an interesting way to structure an acquisition. Tencent has clearly learned from what most Valley companies have done badly in China and doesn’t intend to micromanage Riot from half-a-continent away. It intends for Riot to stay independent, and even has said it would support an eventual Riot IPO. If the deal becomes a success, this could be the new model for acquisitions not only for Tencent– but for Chinese Web companies in general.

ZDNet ran a story this afternoon with a very provocative headline: Not all iPhone apps work on the Verizon iPhone — fragmentation looming? Oh no! Android was supposed to be the platform with the fragmentation problem, not the iPhone! The end must be near, right? Nah.

Author James Kendrick notes that Telenav has just unveiled a version of their turn-by-turn navigation app that will work on the Verizon iPhone. More to the point, Kendrick says that Telenav told him that the app had to be reworked to work on the new device. Leaving aside that the original app was called the “AT&T Navigator”, so clearly they had to rework the name, Kendrick notes, “The Verizon iPhone required modifications to the Telenav app to make it work with the new hardware in the handset.”

So what kind of modifications? Well, Telenav wouldn’t explicitly say. “The company did not elaborate which hardware differences forced the changes, but the primary difference in the two versions of the iPhone lie in the radios (GSM vs. CDMA) and perhaps the GPS chipset,” Kendrick writes.

Hmm. Okay.

But wait, I’ve been using the Verizon iPhone for about two weeks now as I tested it for my review. I’ve used dozens of apps on the new hardware and haven’t once found an app that would not work. This includes several location apps which make use of the phone’s GPS chip. They all work, unmodified.

Further, when I spoke with Apple about apps running on the Verizon iPhone versus the AT&T variety, they assured me that all my apps would run the same just as they always have. They did note that Verizon may launch some of their own apps just as AT&T has, which obviously would not run on the other hardware. But that seems to be more up to the carriers, and tying into their own services, and less about technical hurdles.

And wait, let’s look at the AT&T Navigator. Why is the AT&T name even in the title? Oh, because it is billed directly to your AT&T statement. That, while not mentioned, would definitely be something that would prevent it from working on the Verizon iPhone.

There are clearly some internal changes to the Verizon iPhone — the CDMA chip and a revamped antenna design, chief among them — but I’m failing to see how those will lead to apps that have to be reworked and thus, lead to a fragmentation of the App Store. Maybe there’s something special about turn-by-turn apps (I don’t use any). But beyond carrier billing, I’m just not sure what that is. It definitely doesn’t seem to be the GPS chip that is causing an issue, or Foursquare, Gowalla, and the like would have issues too. They don’t.

The point is that while “fragmentation looming” sounds scary and makes for a sexy headline, it’s complete nonsense from my perspective. That is, the perspective of someone who has used all of his apps — again, unmodified — on the Verizon iPhone.

In introducing his messaging platform last November Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said one of the primary motivations behind Messages product strategy was that teenagers have given up on email, “High school kids don't use email, they use SMS a lot. People want lighter weight things like SMS and IM to message each other.”

A comScore report on 2010 digital trends reinforces at least part of Zuckerberg’s claim.  It’s inevitable: Innovative social messaging platforms like Facebook and Twitter as well mobile communications continue to dominate our online time, and web email begins its steady decline. Total web email usage was down 8% in the past year (YOY), with a whopping 59% decline in use among people between the ages of 12-17. Cue Matt Drudge -style alarm.

Usage was also down 1% among 18-24 year olds, 18% among 25-35 year olds, 8% among 35-44 year olds and 12% among the 45-54 demographic. Because oldsters are continuing to migrate online in droves, web email use actually saw an uptick in the AARP-eligible sector, with 22% gains among 55-64 year olds and 28% among those 65 and older. Obviously this was not enough to offset the decline in youth usage.

Young people are simply spending more time social networking than anything else, up 3.8% to 14.% of all time spent online. In contrast, use of web -based email lost 1.5% at a total of 11% of time spent.

Yahoos and Aols of the world, you might have a problem if people in their mid-twenties aren’t using your product, especially if Zuck is going after them young. Granted Facebook Messages is far from flawless, but it’s a start.

Images: comScore

This weekend, a ratified nuclear arms control treaty between Russia and the United States went into effect, reducing and limiting each nation’s allowable arsenal of nuclear weapons. The new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START 2) also allows U.S. inspectors access to monitor Russian nuclear weapons technology, facilities and forces, which they were prevented from doing since the original START treaty expired in December 2009. As the nations attempt to mitigate a global nuclear arms race, questions remain: what can be done with extant, surplus and aging nukes? Can they be used as a source of clean energy? Do we have the technology?

According to a report by Joshua Pollack in the US Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

“[Russia has] approximately 12,000 nuclear warheads — about 2,600 of them deployed with “strategic” missiles and bombers capable of crossing the oceans — [and so] remains the sole force on Earth that could terminate the existence of the United States on any given day. America has its own massive nuclear arsenal to threaten Russia in return: about 9,400 warheads, including almost 2,000 deployed with strategic delivery systems…”

The World Nuclear Association, a nuclear industry trade group, not surprisingly suggests the conversion of nuclear weapons to energy. The establishment of power plants that can use weapons-grade plutonium and uranium, of course, could help the nuclear industry gain jobs and dollars in energy generation wherever it loses jobs in defense.

Even Bill Gates, who has invested in several energy technology businesses from TerraPower to Neos GeoSolutions, believes in reusing nuclear fuel for energy. TerraPower is trying to build a mini-reactor that could use spent nuclear fuel to power homes and offices, helping divert nuclear waste from storage sites. At his 2010 TED Talks lecture on energy, he noted: “A molecule of uranium has a million times more energy than a molecule of coal.”

Some still argue that the expense to build plants that can convert highly enriched uranium or nuclear weapons to commercial power is not commercially justifiable. Others believe nuclear power, from any sources, is not as clean and safe as other options, like solar or wind.

Clean energy entrepreneurs, who are vying for the support of government and other large investors, often reject the idea of calling nuclear a “clean” energy, thanks to a huge number of accidents on the U.S. historical record alone from Los Alamos to Hanford. That said, nuclear power does not produce carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, or nitrogen oxides.

Health and environmental risks associated with life near nuclear reactors include: contaminated and over-heated ground water; increased risk of childhood leukemia; increased cancer risks overall; and in some areas, decreased air quality from steam emissions; as well as the threat of a nuclear accident.

Platts reports on Monday noted the Sellafield MOX plant in the United Kingdom — established to blend plutonium and uranium oxides into nuclear fuel for commercial power generation — has thus far failed to deliver the energy output its builders promised, and cost the country more money than anticipated.

According to the website of the National Nuclear Security Administration, the U.S. is building a similar plant at the Department of Energy's Savannah River Site near Aiken, South Carolina, due to become operational in 2016.

Image 1: Titan II Missile, at the Titan Missile Museum in Green Valley, Arizona via Evelyn Proimos (CC)

Image 2: A nuclear facility, with water vapor rising from its cooling towers, currently being built in Georgia, via the U.S. Energy Information Administration

With 600 million users, it’s no secret Facebook is dominating social networking. And recent comScore data only reinforces the social network’s staggering growth. For example, Facebook accounted for 10 percent of U.S. page views in 2010, while three out of every ten Internet sessions included a visit to the site.

In December, Facebook's U.S. audience grew to 153.9 million, an increase of 38 percent from the same month in 2009, and the social network became the 4th most visited web property. The total time spent on Facebook in December 2010 vs December 2009 surged 79 percent to 49.4 billion minutes. Total page views grew 71 percent to 76.8 billion.

In terms of unique visitors MySpace came in second in December, but its audience declined 27 percent and total time spent on the site declined 50 percent. Professional social network LinkedIn emerged as the third largest site in the category with 26.6 million visitors in December 2010, which is up 30 percent from the previous year. Twitter saw 23.6 million unique visitors in December, up 18 percent from 2009. And Tumblr.com’s traffic surged 168 percent to 6.7 million
monthly visitors.

Facebook has even surpassed Google, Yahoo and Microsoft in terms of time spent on each site, according to comScore’s data. Hitwise’s data also showed that Facebook was the most visited website in the US in 2010, beating out Google and others.

Although the data isn’t surprising, Facebook’s command over internet users time on the web is impressive. No wonder advertisers are flocking to the social network to reach users.